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CSIS involved in interrogating/transferring of Afghan detainees

Posted by Scott Tribe on March 7, 2010, at 5:38 pm |

In the wake of Friday’s allegations from Professor Attaran that Canada turned over prisoners to Afghanistan knowing they’d be tortured in order to get intelligence out of them, this report from the Canadian Press today adds even more fuel to the demands for a full fledged public inquiry and/or the Conservative government turning over all unredacted documents to Parliament:

Security experts stunned by CSIS’s role in questioning Taliban fighters who may have been tortured:

Officers of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service have played a crucial and long-standing role as interrogators of a vast swath of captured Taliban fighters, The Canadian Press has learned..The spy agency’s previously unknown role in questioning detainees adds a new dimension to the controversy about the handling and possible torture of prisoners by Afghan security forces. It also raises more questions about the critical early years in Kandahar when the Canadian military found itself mired in a guerrilla war it had not expected to fight.

..Intelligence expert Wesley Wark says the revelations are disturbing, partly because CSIS would have had no specialized knowledge of how to elicit information from Afghan prisoners.“I find that stunning,” said Mr. Wark, a historian at the University of Toronto.

3 comments to CSIS involved in interrogating/transferring of Afghan detainees

A public inquiry would be fine but the government MUST also hand over these documents to parliament. For one thing, no government can be allowed to simply ignore the law. For another, we can’t afford to wait two or three years to find out what went on here.

This also seems to be a rather troubling revelation, when put into perspective:
“The spies would sometimes make recommendations on which Taliban prisoners to hand over to the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s notorious intelligence service, the sources said.”

At this time, did the CSIS know NDS was a torturing outfit? Did they transfer detainees knowing the NDS was a torturing outfit?